


won't be too soon 'til I say... goodnight moon

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [60]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Doppelganger, Haunted Houses, Horror, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Mirrors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 08:29:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20871230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: The house was built in the fall of 1882. It’s an old, beat up farmhouse, too big for any one person, with long dusty corridors and doors that haven’t been opened in decades. The porch sags in the middle like the lopsided, elderly thing that it is, and the trees surrounding the property are older than the house itself, so overgrown that their branches scratch at the windowpanes if the wind so much as kicks up even the slightest fuss.When Sora was a child, he would wander those corridors trailing his fingers along the peeling walls, his fingertips leaving their imprints behind in the dust and catching on cobwebs, which would trail after him like ghosts. He would climb those trees, peering in through windows that were like portals to another world, another time - the furniture within decades old, dusty, rotting.Now the house is his.





	won't be too soon 'til I say... goodnight moon

**Author's Note:**

> Day 2 of October. Today's prompts were: moon cycles, nightmare, cage, lookalike, mirrors, glowing eyes. 
> 
> The moment I saw the selection of prompts for today, I knew I wanted to write about Sora. See, once upon a time ago, back in 2004 or so, a lovely person named Uzumaki-sama wrote something called [Goodnight Moon](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2116339/1/Goodnight-Moon). And while I knew that wasn't exactly what I was going for, I did want to write something that felt the way reading that did back in the day. I knew I wanted to write about doppelgangers and mirrors and a spooky old house. So that's what I did. All the same, I wanted to pay my respects to the old story that inspired this one. Still thinking of you, Uzu. 
> 
> Title is by Shivaree. You should 100% listen to it.

The house was built in the fall of 1882. It’s an old, beat up farmhouse, too big for any one person, with long dusty corridors and doors that haven’t been opened in decades. The porch sags in the middle like the lopsided, elderly thing that it is, and the trees surrounding the property are older than the house itself, so overgrown that their branches scratch at the windowpanes if the wind so much as kicks up even the slightest fuss.

When Sora was a child, he would wander those corridors trailing his fingers along the peeling walls, his fingertips leaving their imprints behind in the dust and catching on cobwebs, which would trail after him like ghosts. He would climb those trees, peering in through windows that were like portals to another world, another time - the furniture within decades old, dusty, rotting.

He would imagine the people who once lived in those rooms - wailing widows with a bundle of loud children, society girls playing with boardgames that summoned the dead, tired-eyed husbands who never did more than sleep in their home.

As a child, the house was terrifying. It loomed up out of the darkness and every creak at night sounded like a monster creeping up on you out of the dark. There were shadows in every corner, a black so dark that it was almost like peering into the void. He would huddle under his pillows and blankets at night, and count the seconds until morning, when the dawn would spill through the window and he could finally, finally sleep.

As an adult, the house is still terrifying, but now it is his.

He didn’t want to move here. Wanted to stay in the city with his friends, where he could step out of his front door and walk down the street to find a bar or a park or something else to occupy his time. But times were tough, and the house, old as it was, would turn a profit if they could manage to spruce it up.

The only problem with that was that the construction crews never stayed long, citing ghosts or curses before taking their trucks and barrel-chested men with them, leaving Sora and his big old house alone in the dust.

The nearest town is forty minutes away. The fields surrounding the house, which were once bloated with produce - flourishing stalks of green-eared corn, lush heavy-leafed soybean, and plump, smiling pumpkins - have stagnated. The once impressive field of corn is still there, but the corn is withered, brown and rustling all year round, and the rest of the crops have dried up, died from neglect or bad weather, or both.

There is nothing profitable about this house. It’s a curse. A nightmare.

Riku had come with Sora when he moved. He’d said that it could be fun, fixing the place up, and Sora knew that he had daydreams of rolling around on tarp, paint on Sora’s nose and the smell of sawdust in the air. He could work from home, he said, make some calls and make sure that everything was wired right so he could put in wi-fi.

It wasn’t fun. Maybe at first it was, before the first construction crew had turned their backs on them. Before the smell of rot and mold began to saturate every room. Before Riku realized that no matter how many people came out to take a look at it, they could never quite get the wiring right.

“It’ll only be for a bit,” Riku told him, but his smile was strained around the edges.

He went into town every day, where he sat at some coffee shop and leached their wi-fi, making phone calls to important people back home and eating his weight in apple pie. He came back before the sun went down most nights, but sometimes, he had to get a room at the local motel so he could finish his work before morning.

Those nights, Sora hated the worst.

The house _with_ Riku was bad enough. The presence of another human being didn’t dull the sense of being watched, didn’t make the smells any better, or cause the trees to scratch less, but being in it with someone else along for the ride was comforting, because at least you weren’t in it alone.

The house alone is like being slowly suffocated. Sora doesn’t sleep. Doesn’t leave his pool of light in the sitting room until the sun creeps in through the windows, and only then does he stumble off to the single clean bed in the whole place, and collapse into a painfully restless sleep.

It takes three months before Riku makes some excuse and says he has to fly back to the city for a bit. They’re sitting in bed, the glow of the early morning sunlight filtering in through the dirty windows, shining light on the dust motes hovering in the air between them.

“It won’t be long,” Riku tells him. “A week. That’s it. Just to get some stuff back on track.”

Sora, who has seen the increasingly agitated way that Riku barks orders back to home base, watches him dully, and doesn’t think that it will only be a week. He swallows, and tastes the dryness of his mouth. The sour tang of sleep.

“All right,” he says.

Riku wilts, sagging backwards against the headboards like a puppet whose strings have been cut, like maybe he was expecting a fight. Maybe Sora should have given him one. Maybe then he’d stay.

“You could come with me,” Riku murmurs, his voice a frail offering.

Peace. The city. Their friends. A bed that doesn’t smell like mildew and a house that doesn’t scare the fucking shit out of him.

It’s a beautiful dream.

“No,” he makes himself say. He can feel the words hovering between them, as good as a death sentence. “Someone should stay with the house. The sooner we have these repairs done, the sooner we can get back to civilization.”

“Mm,” Riku sighs, a hum of a sound. His fingers find Sora’s thigh among the sheets. “Civilization. Real food.”

Sora snorts. “Fresh air.”

“Book stores.”

“Uber drivers.”

“Barcades.”

“Tacos.”

“_Margaritas_.”

They both collapse into laughter, and beneath the sheets, Riku’s hand creeps further up his thigh. A tingle starts at the base of Sora’s spine, a thrill of heat that zings through him for the first time in weeks, so he pulls Riku down for a kiss, and lets the rest happen naturally.

The sex is a nice distraction, gets his mind off what they both know is coming. The long goodbyes, the car vanishing off into the distance, the oppressive heavy feeling of knowing that you’re going to be alone for longer than a day or two. It’s good sex, which is even better, because he’s not entirely sure if they’ve actually had that since their first week here.

Somehow, during these last few months, they’ve let sex between them become little more than something to keep them warm at night. A warm mouth or a calloused hand between his thighs in the dark. They’ve broken out the lube a handful of times at most, and each time it’s been monotonous, _boring_, like following a script.

That morning, Riku pulls out all the stops. He tumbles Sora back onto the sheets and is reaching for the lube before Sora can so much as gasp the word into the air between them.

But as good as it is, it won’t stop Riku from leaving.

The next day, Sora watches him roll away down that long, dusty road, just how he’d imagined it. Sora keeps watching until the car vanishes from sight, and only then does he turn back to the house.

The silence waits for him there, so thick he can taste it.

Sora closes his eyes and wishes for something. Anything. A dog, a cat, a fucking rabbit. Anything to make noise that isn’t the own horrible thundering of the heart locked inside his chest.

He doesn’t sleep that night. He didn’t think that he would, but it’s worse than he thought it would be. The house creaks and groans around him, and Sora tries to wait it out, tries not to flinch when something sounds like it’s scratching at the door or when an owl screeches just outside the window.

He has a book, but he can’t focus on it. Just holds still in utter terror until morning, and even with the dawn, his sleep is restless.

He makes oatmeal the next morning, but the thick paste tastes like sawdust instead of apple cinnamon. When he goes for a walk to get his mind off the house, the corn rustles endlessly around him. He keeps hearing footsteps behind him, but when he turns around, no one is there.

The next night is a little better. Riku calls, and the signal lasts long enough for Sora to hear Kairi, tinny and distant, demanding that Riku tell him how much she misses him. When he loses the connection, Sora sits for a long minute and stares at the phone between his cradled palms, fighting the urge to chuck the damn thing down the hall.

He sleeps a little, curled into the musty red armchair in the sitting room, his book unread in his lap. About four in the morning, the light overhead stutters out, and Sora jolts into waking with a start.

In this house, at night, the dark is true dark. There are no street lamps to shine in through the windows, no cars passing by to cast the shape of their headlights onto the walls, no light pollution to make the night sky shine red and violet. The light is dead and the darkness is all-encompassing. Tonight, there isn’t even a moon.

Something sounds in the hallway upstairs, a sound like something being dragged, and Sora listens in petrified silence until the noise happens again, and again, until it's finally gone. His muscles have gone so stiff that they hurt, and his teeth ache from how hard he’s clenching them. He strains to pick out any sound in the dark.

He doesn’t sleep, not even when the dawn comes.

Sora spends the next day drifting through the house like a ghost. He checks each and every room, ignoring the terror he feels at every screeching hinge, every jammed door. The doors aren’t as endless as they’d seemed when he was a kid, but the rooms they hide are just as eerie. In the intervening years, someone has covered each and every piece of rotting furniture with ghostly white sheets, as if they’re something other than what they truly are - rotting remnants of a bygone age - not something valuable to be preserved.

He checks under every bed, within every dark closet - a child searching for the bogeyman that haunts him each night.

The cellar and the attic are off limits as long as Sora’s alone here, and he goes so far as to barricade the cellar door, dragging the heavy bookcase across worn thin floorboards and probably doing irreparable damage to the boards in the process. He doesn’t care. That’s one door that he does not want opening.

When the sun starts drooping close to the horizon, Sora replaces the light bulb over his chair, and huddles down to wait. The book remains on the table beside him.

Every night is quiet here, but tonight feels more so. Maybe that’s just because of how hard he’s listening, but even the wind has grown silent outside, as if it fears what waits in the dark of this house too.

At 2:15, there’s a thump upstairs. The light above him flickers, and Sora’s breath catches. He wishes that he’d chosen a different room. The sitting room is good, the room that feels the safest in the whole house. Bookshelves line the walls, the friendly spines of countless books looking back at him, a rainbow of blues, and reds, and bottled greens, shiny leather bindings gleaming. The lamps make the place seem warm and inviting, and the furniture is well-worn, well-loved.

There are two ways out of this room, one leading to the left and into the kitchen, and the other to the right, where the actual living room waits, done up in a gothic, almost baroque style. The only problem with the sitting room is that there’s no door to close. No way to possibly shut himself off from the rest of the house. The empty archways leading to the other rooms are gaping black voids, what might as well be doorways to another world.

The light goes out.

“Please,” Sora whispers, and the thump sounds again, followed by the dragging noise that he’d heard the night before.

He doesn’t know how long he waits there in the dark, tense and ready to run. It could be minutes. Could be hours. He knows that it isn't days, but it feels like it.

He blinks, and when his eyes open again, milliseconds later, there are a pair of glowing yellow eyes in the doorway. He swallows down a scream, retracting his legs in on himself, until he’s pressed as far as he can go back into the cushions of his chair.

The eyes don’t move. They don’t blink.

They’re at roughly head height, right where a human’s eyes would be if human eyes glowed in the goddamn dark. They watch him, and he watches them right back. He thinks that they’re waiting for him to blink so he doesn’t, until his eyes water, his vision warping from staring into the dark so long.

But Sora is only human. After a time, he blinks.

When he opens his eyes again, the eyes are gone.

A chill prickles the back of his neck. He shudders and doesn’t move, prey sense freezing him in place. This is how animals die. They don’t run when they should, frozen in fear.

He feels breath on the back of his neck, warm and moist, smelling vaguely of copper.

He still doesn’t move.

Something touches the back of his neck. It’s cold, like what he’d imagine touching a corpse to feel like.

“Please,” he says again, tears in his eyes, because it can’t hurt to beg.

_Please_, something says, mockingly, and Sora starts to hyperventilate.

The thing leans in closer, until Sora can feel cold lips touch his ear.

_Please what, little boy?_

Sora swallows.

In a playful, sing-song voice, it trills,_ I can’t hear you._

He’s crying now, hot tears streaking down his cheeks. His shoulders tremble, but still he doesn’t move. “Please don’t hurt me.”

It laughs, or Sora thinks it does. It doesn’t sound like the sort of laugh he’s ever heard before, a sound that folds in on itself, pitched high and low at once.

_Why would I hurt you?_ it asks. _Then I would have no one to play with._

And just like that, the creature is gone.

Sora stays like that until morning, crying until his eyes feel hot and puffy, paralyzed with fear.

When dawn spills into the house the next day, Sora gathers up his things and walks into town. It takes him hours, what would be a forty minute car ride taking up a good portion of the day on foot, but he gets there before noon, spilling into the little diner Riku came to when he worked and pouring himself into a corner booth.

The waitress, when she comes, approaches him like he’s a wild animal, her dark, kohl-lined eyes wary and distrustful.

“You okay there, kiddo?” she asks, holding her pot of coffee close to her body, like she’s planning on using it as a weapon if he makes any sudden moves.

Jerkily, Sora nods. He tries to paste a smile on his face.

“Can I have a coffee, please?” he asks. “And the wi-fi password?”

The waitress blinks, and slowly, relaxes a little. She flashes him a fleeting smile. “You want any food with that coffee?”

He swallows again, and tries to remember if he ate yesterday. The oatmeal, he thinks, was the day before.

“Yeah,” he says, and looks around helplessly, as if a menu will appear if he wishes for it hard enough. The waitress laughs, her eyes crinkling up at the edges. It makes her look younger, less hard-eyed and bitter. He hopes she laughs more at home.

“One sec,” she says, and crosses the room to grab a menu from behind the register. She hands it to him, then pours him a coffee, setting the pot down on the table at his elbow. When he glances at her, she shrugs. “Looks like you might need it.”

He orders bacon and eggs, along with something called the ‘boo berry classic’, which she assures him is basically just blueberry pancakes with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

“And the wi-fi password is ‘dennyssucks’,” she calls back over her shoulder as she’s walking away.

Sora sits there for a minute after she’s gone, just letting the familiar sounds of people settle over him, calming his nerves. He takes a sip of his coffee and grimaces. It’s burnt, but beggars can’t be choosers.

He gets out his laptop and fusses about plugging it into the wall and booting it up, sipping on his coffee as he goes. There’s warm light coming in through the broad windows and the family next to him is bickering playfully. He feels more human here than he has since Riku left.

He calls Riku. It’s not even noon, which means that Riku will be at the office. He’ll be giving some of the other developers shit about their code, probably. Might be in a meeting. Might not be able to pick up. But Sora tries him anyway.

When Riku answers, his face is huge and surprised, and yes,_ incredibly_ pixelated.

“Sora,” he crows, his voice oozing pure delight. He looks soft, hair pulled up into a half-hearted bun at the nape of his neck, wearing a soft purple sweater that he’d stolen from Wakka several years back. Sora misses him horribly. “I didn’t expect to hear from you!”

“I know,” Sora tells him, and takes another gulp of his coffee. “I just… wanted to talk to you.”

Riku’s eyes go soft, and he gives Sora one of his best smiles. Sora wants more than anything to be there with him.

His smile must falter a little, because Riku’s look shifts to one of concern.

“Hey, is everything all right?”

Sora can’t tell him about the creature, he realizes. Riku will think he’s gone fucking nuts. His chest feels brittle, like the bones inside are collapsing in on themselves. He hums, and takes another drink to hide the way that his mouth trembles.

“I’m fine,” he lies. “I just miss you.”

Riku smiles at him, still soft, and says, “I miss you too.”

It feels like a goodbye.

The walk back to the house is long. The afternoon sun might be chilly enough for Riku to wear a sweater back home, but here, the weather hasn’t quite gotten the memo that it’s supposed to be autumn. The air is thick and the sun high overhead beats down on his back. Sora is tired. More tired than he’s been in months, and the coffee isn’t helping.

The house looms before him, the front door yawning red and hungry like the maw of some beast come to eat him whole.

Sora hesitates on the front stoop, eyes running over the peeling paint of the porch. The old rocking chair with the broken leg. The mildew stained table at its side that might have been white a long, long time ago. The tire swing hanging from the tree in the front yard, where his grandmother used to push him.

When he enters the house, it makes a noise like a sigh around him, and the door slams shut at his back.

There’s a mirror in the front foyer the size of a person, grand and gilded gold around the edges. He’s avoided looking at it the entire time they’ve been here, ignoring his reflection whenever he enters or leaves the house, like he’s avoided every mirror that he’s ever encountered since he was six years old.

He doesn’t avoid it now.

His reflection grins back at him.

Sora isn’t grinning.

_Thought you weren’t coming back,_ a voice whispers.

It comes from behind him. In front of him. From the mirror. From the kitchen. It’s all around him, a source impossible to pinpoint. But his reflection is staring at him expectantly, so Sora straightens his spine and tells it, “I didn’t want to.”

His reflection cocks its head, eyes narrowed._ But you did._

Sora nods. “But I did.”

It’s a game he used to play when he was little. In a house as old and huge as this one, there were bound to be a lot of mirrors. And there were. Big ones, small ones, some in places he couldn’t reach, some in places he didn’t want to reach. Most of them were easy to overlook - mirrors that you didn’t even know were there until you tilted your head and looked through the shadows _just right_.

Sora was here when he first met his reflection, standing in this exact same spot. Six years old and playing games with the boy in the mirror who never did exactly what he was doing. He would try to sync up their movements or say the same things, but the boy in the mirror always, inevitably, did something different. Just a little.

As Sora watches, unblinking, his reflection seems to shimmer. It smiles wide, all teeth, and then it’s reaching out-

The hand emerges first, paler than Sora’s own at first glance. On second glance, the hand is made of shadows, a limb made of void substance. On the third, it resolves back into a perfect mirror of Sora’s.

A forearm. An elbow. Shoulders. A bowed head. A torso.

Sora swallows and watches it cling to the wall as it pulls the rest of its body from the mirror. Inch by monstrous inch.

Shoulders straighten, the head raises.

“Hello,” his twin says.

Its eyes, unlike Sora’s, are bright yellow and slitted like a cat’s.

“Hello,” Sora says.

It cocks its head at him. “You got older.”

“You did, too.”

His reflection smiles at him, showing off a neat row of pointed white teeth.

“I gave you a scare last night, didn’t I?” it says proudly, folding an arm behind its head, leaning back on the balls of its feet as it surveys him.

“Yes,” Sora says, simply.

It was always better to keep things simple towards the end of his time here, but the damage had already been done. It had learned too much from him, thieving his movements, his speech patterns, the way he breathed.

It had followed him through every mirror since, always watching, his reflection never quite right, his smile always just a hint too mocking. But this house was the only place that it’s ever had enough power to pull itself through the door between their worlds.

It prowls closer, circling him, and Sora feels…

He’s not sure how he feels. This moment, he thinks, was inevitable.

He never should have come back to this house. He should have knocked it down and sold the plot of land for cheap, never looking back.

“You left me,” it says finally.

“I did.” He pauses, then thinks to add, “I’m sorry.”

“I was alone.”

Sora stares at it. “No, you weren’t.”

It stares back. “Shadows don’t count.”

To that, Sora doesn’t say anything. What is this creature, if not a shadow? If shadows don’t count, then what is it? His reflection is no different than the hundreds of other ghosts and things that creep through that door and into this house at night. It’s just stronger, because Sora let it eat too much of him away.

It leans in, and touches him, lightly on the elbow. Its touch is cold, like a corpse. Like glass. Like a mirror.

“Come back with me,” it says, tone almost pleading.

Sora sucks in a breath. “What if I don’t want to?”

The creature, his twin, his shadow self, bares its needle-like teeth. “Then I eat you.”

“Then you’ll be alone.”

It considers for a moment, then shakes its head. “I won’t. I’ll have you.”

“I won’t be able to play,” Sora tells it, fighting to keep his voice even, his face expressionless. Fear gives it too much power. “I’ll be dead. Just a part of you.”

“Better that than being alone,” it says, and that-

That’s loneliness in its voice. He’d known that it felt. Had always known that the creature, monstrous as it was, had stolen his emotions as well. That made it human, if only a little.

“If you come with me,” it says, “I promise not to eat your human.”

Sora slips a bit, and anger, _spite_ slips into his voice. “If you eat him, I’ll _never_ come back.”

It’s shadow goes darker around the edges. Outside the sun is setting.

“Then I’ll just eat both of you,” it hisses, Sora’s anger coloring its voice.

Sora licks his lips. There’s a fine sheen of sweat across the back of his neck. He is so very tired. He wants to go home. Wants to be with Riku and their friends. He never should have come back to this place.

Once, when he was little - older than six, younger than nine, when he’d last set foot in this house - he had let his twin drag him through the mirror.

The world inside was dark. Cold. The house inside looked exactly like this one, but… different. Ruined. Rotted. In fact, that world looked a lot like this one does now. Like the mirror world is eating into this one, corrosive, stealing the life from the fields, the trees, the house itself, before finally moving on to its inhabitants.

Except there, the shadows truly were alive. The nightmares were_ real_.

Sora spent a little over an hour in that world, playing hide and seek in the darkness, chasing his shadow around the dead trees outside. When he’d gone back through the mirror, back home, over a week had passed.

“If I go with you,” he says in a wobbly voice, “I’ll miss Riku. All of our friends.”

His shadow watches him. “Then come back later.”

Sora closes his eyes, feeling tears tremble on his lashes. It won’t work that way. This shadow him doesn’t work that way. It will eat him up until there’s nothing left, and whatever it chooses to leave behind will be spat back out into a world that’s moved on without him.

But Riku will be safe. He won’t come back to an empty house where Sora’s reflection will be waiting for him with teeth sharp as knives.

“Okay,” Sora tells it. “Okay. But only for a little while.”

His shadow grins with every single one of its shiny white teeth. It reaches out and takes Sora’s hand. Pulls him towards the mirror.

Beyond it is a mass of writhing shadows.

“Only for a little while,” it agrees, and pulls him over the threshold.

**Author's Note:**

> My [tumblr](https://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/), if you dare.


End file.
